I am one of the nation’s leading thinkers on health policy. I am a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and author of the widely acclaimed book, Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis. The Wall Street Journal calls me "the father of Health Savings Accounts." Modern Health Care says I am one of four people who have most influenced the changes shaping our health care system. I am the author of eight other books, including Leaving Women Behind: Modern Families, Outdated Laws; and Patient Power, the condensed version of which sold more than 300,000 copies and am credited with playing a pivotal role in the defeat of Hillary Clinton’s health reform. I have authored numerous editorials in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Investor's Business Daily, Los Angeles Times, and many others.I regularly appear on television, including CNN, CNBC and the Fox News Channel. I appeared on many William F. Buckley Jr. Firing Line shows, and was Mr. Buckley’s debating partner on a number of two-hour prime time debates – including such topics as the flat tax, welfare reform and Social Security privatization. I regularly brief members of Congress on economic policy and frequently testify before congressional committees. I am the author or co-author of more than 50 published studies on such topics as health policy, tax reform and school choice. I have an active speaking schedule and have addressed more than 100 different organizations on public policy issues. I received a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University. I have taught and done research at Columbia University, Stanford University, Dartmouth University, Southern Methodist University and the University of Dallas. I received the prestigious Duncan Black award in 1988 for the best scholarly article on public choice economics.

Is Poverty In The World's Richest Country Simply Bad Luck?

Covered with a blanket, a homeless man sleeps along a Hollywood sidewalk in California. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

There is a new study out with the finding that urban sprawl contributes to inequality, making it more difficult for the poor to climb the income ladder.

Okay, let’s accept that idea for a moment. Why is there urban sprawl? Isn’t it directly tied to liberal policies that have prevailed over the past 40 years? Federal judges and the teachers unions combined to destroy the inner city schools. So middle class families who wanted a decent education for their children had no choice but to turn to private schools or retreat to the suburbs. Then, minimum wage laws, labor monopolies and the lure of welfare made the inner city increasingly unattractive to employers seeking a productive workforce.

As the tax base shrinks and taxpaying voters disappear, city government becomes completely captured by the public sector unions. They use their power to pad their own compensation at the expense of deteriorating city services and to wrest promises of post-retirement benefits that can only be paid by an (unlikely) influx of new taxpayers. Thus starts a downward political death spiral that can only end in bankruptcy.

So what’s the obvious public policy conclusion? Don’t adopt policies that chase the middle class and the job creator community away. Or at least that would be obvious unless you write for The New York Times. Here is Paul Krugman, who does a decent job of describing the study’s conclusions:

“Atlanta looks just like Detroit gone bust: both are places where the American dream seems to be dying, where the children of the poor have great difficulty climbing the economic ladder. In fact, upward social mobility — the extent to which children manage to achieve a higher socioeconomic status than their parents — is even lower in Atlanta than it is in Detroit…

And in Atlanta poor and rich neighborhoods are far apart because, basically, everything is far apart; Atlanta is the Sultan of Sprawl, even more spread out than other major Sun Belt cities…As a result, disadvantaged workers often find themselves stranded; there may be jobs available somewhere, but they literally can’t get there.”

As it turns out, the sprawl theory of perpetual poverty may be completely wrong. Randal O’Toole says it won’t hold water and notes that only a few years ago Krugman blamed the housing bubble on anti-sprawl policies.

Even so, what are the solutions? All Krugman has to offer is:

“[T]his observation clearly reinforces the case for policies that help families function without multiple cars.”

Cars? What about the teachers unions? Not a word. What about the lack of school choice? Nada. Minimum wage laws, labor union monopoles, and other restrictions on the right to work? Not a peep. A culture of welfare dependency that erodes the willingness to work? Zero. City governments doing what private companies are no longer allowed to do: promising post-retirement benefits without funding them? Zilch.

What about the fact that the policies routinely advocated on the editorial pages of the Times are far more harmful to social mobility than the automobile could ever be? Not a word about that either.

What’s true of cities is also true of states. People and capital move where they are welcome. As Travis Brown and I wrote the other day in the Dallas Morning News:

“Texas is the nation’s No. 1 job creator. Since the official end of the recession in 2009, Texas has been responsible for almost one out of every two jobs created in the entire country.

This is not a new phenomenon. For decades, Texas has been creating jobs faster than other states. Between 2001 and 2011, while many other states were hemorrhaging jobs, Texas increased private-sector employment by 732,800…

Why has Texas been so successful at job creation? We’re a very labor-friendly state — meaning that government doesn’t very often get between job creators and job seekers. The Mercatus Center at George Mason University ranks Texas No. 1 in labor market freedom.”

I don’t know what it is about the left, but they can’t see the connection between the policies they advocate and the harmful results they decry.

Take President Obama. He is now talking about the economy. But the way he talks about it is as though (after 4 ½ year in office) he bears no personal responsibility for anything that’s happened. As Charles Krauthammer pointed out the other night, Obama talks about the economy “as if he has been a bystander,” as someone who “just arrived on a boat.” “It’s his economy and he’s pretending he just stumbled on it.”

Hmmm. Maybe we should send them all back to school for a course in mainstream economics.

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Great column. I think people vastly underestimate the effect of poor inner-city schools on the problems that cities have. Without public schools that middle class families are willing to send their kids to, cities end up with only the very rich and the poor. The middle class commutes from the suburbs. I suspect that schools far outweigh other factors like taxes or non-school local government services.

of course, Krugman calls for a govt prescriptions. It’s all he knows. When you exonorate every facet of govt involvement from culpability, it stands to reason that more govt involvement is your only answer. Isn’t it time for the Nobel people to reclaim a couple of their prizes?

Unions limit competition and it shows in every aspect of Detroit, from the Teachers, the municipal employees, to unionized news media and the lack of competition from new non-union businesses. Detroit is a union town and that applies to more than labor. Other union towns should learn a lesson, before their demise, but they won’t.

Urban sprawl is made possible by lower transportation costs, but the separation of populations by class and ethnic group is nothing new. People have been doing this for centuries. And while the author lauds economic growth (and I’m a fan of Texas especially Gov Rick Perry), the state’s urban areas don’t fair any better in the referenced study than liberal L.A. and NYC.

My second point is to suggest that Goodman get some help writing. The first half of the column is about upward mobility. The second half is about growth in Texas. A helper, someone with a high school education or equivalent, could help Goodman decide whether he wants to write about upward mobility or economic growth in Texas. Or could write two separate columns, one for next week.

If you look at the actual history of white flight to the suburbs, it wasn’t “poor schools” that was the driving force. It was school desegregation. Over time, as the burbs grew and job creation began to be centered in the burbs, the central cities declined.

The answer is no, to the question of poverty being a matter of luck. Poverty is a direct consequence of the privatization of America’s currency. When a privately owned banking and monetary syndicate create the nation’s money stock as debt, poverty is the inevitable result. The price of money, currently costing $3 trillion in annual interest on a debt-based money supply of $60 trillion, will drain the entire money supply into the banking system’s coffers in just twenty years, making a few well-positioned individuals and corporations fabulously wealth, leaving the bulk of th population struggling to survive. Currently the wealthiest 400 individuals have title to wealth equal to the holding of the bottom half of the population, more than 150,000,000 people.

This would be funny if it weren’t published as a serious contributor piece to a national publication. The author is simply WRONG on the facts–here is the link to the Map of benefits utilization based on Factual Data From the US Government–not this guy’s imagination. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/12/us/entitlement-map.html?_r=0

The truth is that, in fact, urban sprawl HAS impacted the poverty trap-by forcing the poor to move further and further afield to find work –thereby requiring autos rather than mass transit, 20-30% premiums for housing in high end suburbs; But the author has cause/effect mixed up–The White Middle and upper classes moved to the burbs largely as a function of fleeing Blacks, Latinos and other immigrant classes–which then left the cities with diminished tax bases and led to crumbling infrastructure, denied funding to schools to keep pace with educational demands and many of the other ills of the current urban environment–if bad schools and crumbling infrastructure had been the cause you would be seeing those same people LEAVING AMERICA–where putzes like this guy have built a self fulfilling prophecy of decay by taking our infrastructure budget from 18.5% of the Federal/State total spend in 1965 to less than 3% in 2013; Education funding from 12% of Federal and 19% of State budgets in 1965 to less than 8% and 11% currently on average. We don’t have a liberal policy issue here–we have a conscious, deliberate de-funding of aid to those who need it most and a deliberate draw down of America’s physical plant by those who choose NOT to pay their fair share–rather than support the budget items that could rebuild America’s future–but for their obstructionist policies.

So urban sprawl and inner city decay are caused by judges and teachers’ unions. For sheer, self-confident oversimplification that would take the cake, were it not for a similarly simplistic analysis that used to blame the whole thing on rent controls.

Both commentators appear to agree that it has nothing to do with zoning regulations, inter-municipal competition for property taxes, loss of industrial jobs to emerging economies, public subsidies for roads and oil production, or racism. If that’s a fair sample of the profundity of policy thinking that governs urban growth, it’s small wonder so many American cities are falling apart.

“Federal judges and the teachers unions combined to destroy the inner city schools….Then, minimum wage laws, labor monopolies and the lure of welfare made the inner city increasingly unattractive to employers seeking a productive workforce.”

Some extremely audacious claims, and ones that I hold to be flagrantly false and deeply nefarious. Yet this John Goodman character makes them as matter-of-factly as one might say that the earth is round. Right out of the gate, he destroyed any credibility he might have had, at least in the eyes of this reader. He is a caricature of the anti-labor right-wing class warrior.

This is what I see in those part’s of the city around the u.s. And the Hemp growing of farmer’s should pass so we can make job’s if A Person can Make money in the STOCK MARKET on HEMP THen Why Can we not make Job’s!!!! That’s Health Care!!!